Date Clock Requires (Almost) No Interaction

A lot of commercial offerings of technology aimed at helping the elderly seem to do a good job on the surface, but anything other than superficial interaction with them tends to be next to impossible for its intended users. Complicated user interfaces and poor design consideration reign in this space. …read more

Continue reading Date Clock Requires (Almost) No Interaction

Microsoft Teams gets Yammer integration, secure private channels, and more

You’re forgiven if you thought Yammer, Microsoft’s proto-Slack, not quite realtime, chat application was dead. But it’s actually still alive (and well) — and still serves a purpose as a slower-moving social network-like channel for company- and team-wide announcements. Today, Microsoft announced that, among other updates, it will offer a Yammer integration in Teams, its […] Continue reading Microsoft Teams gets Yammer integration, secure private channels, and more

Adoption and Change Management: Two Sides of the Office 365 Card

Office 365 with Teams
Office 365 with Teams

Adoption and Change Management are often discussed when companies move to cloud services, including Office 365. How quickly can we adopt the new services and how can we manage change? As it happens, Microsoft is extremely interested in driving customer adoption, so much so that this can cause problems with change management simply because so much change happens so quickly insist Office 365. As we discuss here, a structured approach to change management helps.

The post Adoption and Change Management: Two Sides of the Office 365 Card appeared first on Petri.

Continue reading Adoption and Change Management: Two Sides of the Office 365 Card

Planner Supports Export to Excel

Exporting tasks for a plan
Exporting tasks for a plan

Excel fans delight! You can now export task data for a Planner plan to Excel and slice and dice the task information to your heart’s content. The new feature is likely to be popular with Office 365 users because it adds values and it makes sense to use Excel for this purpose, but another way of looking at it is that Planner is so poor at analysis and reporting that it needed external help. The truth probably lies in the middle.

The post Planner Supports Export to Excel appeared first on Petri.

Continue reading Planner Supports Export to Excel

Planner Does Multiplan


Microsoft has announced the ability of the Planner web app to create multiple plans for an Office 365 group. This is a useful feature that Teams and SharePoint Online (the Planner web part) can already do, but some extra work was needed to break the connection between a plan and a group, and that’s what Multiplan means. Or it means a spreadsheet.

The post Planner Does Multiplan appeared first on Petri.

Continue reading Planner Does Multiplan

Analyzing the Numbers for Different Office 365 Workloads

Office 365 with Teams
Office 365 with Teams

Microsoft says that Office 365 has 155 million monthly active users. That’s an interesting statistic, but how many people use Exchange, SharePoint, Teams, Yammer, and Planner? Microsoft never gives firm numbers, only clues to what might be happening, so we have to do some analysis to tease out what might be happening behind the Office 365 curtain.

The post Analyzing the Numbers for Different Office 365 Workloads appeared first on Petri.

Continue reading Analyzing the Numbers for Different Office 365 Workloads

Does Your Office 365 Tenant Need Backups?


Do you need to backup Office 365 data? The question isn’t simple because technology changes all the time and it’s hard to backup some applications like Teams and Planner because APIs don’t exist. The important thing is for companies to review what data they use, the features available to them, and then figure out if any gaps exist.

The post Does Your Office 365 Tenant Need Backups? appeared first on Petri.

Continue reading Does Your Office 365 Tenant Need Backups?

Managing Office 365 Guest Accounts

Office 365 with Teams

Many Office 365 applications (Teams, Groups, Planner, SharePoint, etc.) now support external guest access. you might end up with a lot of guests, and like any good accommodation, some management is needed. In this article, we look at how to manage the guests created by Office 365.

The post Managing Office 365 Guest Accounts appeared first on Petri.

Continue reading Managing Office 365 Guest Accounts

Office 365 News and Views – June 2018

Lots happens in a month within Office 365. I can’t possibly write an article about every change in SharePoint, Teams, Exchange, etc. released by Microsoft,, so sometimes I need to publish a catch-up (or catch-up) post. Here are ten things that I think are interesting enough for you to know about.

The post Office 365 News and Views – June 2018 appeared first on Petri.

Continue reading Office 365 News and Views – June 2018

Guest Access in Planner Rolls Out

Planner Guest 2

Planner now supports guest user access to its plans. Office 365 tenants will celebrate this feature because they’ve been waiting for it to arrive. It’s curious that it has taken Microsoft so long to upgrade Planner for this feature given that Groups and Teams have had this capability for a while. But it’s here now, so enjoy.

The post Guest Access in Planner Rolls Out appeared first on Petri.

Continue reading Guest Access in Planner Rolls Out